• Tempus Fugit@midwest.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    3 days ago

    I’m just glad I quit coffee a year ago. I’ve known for a long time that coffee prices have been held artificially low and could explode at any moment.

  • boonhet@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    4 days ago

    Caffeine tablets it is then… Oh wait I bet those are going to be affected too. Fun times

  • ImTedBell@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    4 days ago

    Time for everyone here to research: Chickory. Alternative to coffee and you can grow it at home.

  • jjjjm182@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    4 days ago

    It’s kind of a conspiracy theory of mine, but I’m trying to wean myself off coffee because I expect a price hike to come sooner or later. The majority of the Western world can’t get through the day without it, and I expect most people will still pay for it even when the price goes up.

    • Rose56@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      4 days ago

      It’s like those people saying quit your every day coffee/breakfast/lunch/cigarette and you will afford a house.

          • Machinist@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            4 days ago

            Holy shit! At that point, you could probably turn a profit growing shitty tobacco in a greenhouse and selling it black market.

            • pHr34kY@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              0
              ·
              4 days ago

              The black market is bigger than the legitimate market. It’s out of control.

              We even effectively banned vapes. They can only be legally dispensed by a pharmacy, and the pharmacists want nothing to do with it.

              • Machinist@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                4 days ago

                Crazy. That’s effectively prohibition, and we all know what that does to black and grey markets.

                I have given up on trying to fight my nicotine addiction. Vape with homemade liquid because I’m cheap and I want to know what’s in it. Smoke pipes and occasionally a cigar as I really love tobacco. May grow my own tobacco at some point just to play with it. (From the US)

                Anyhow, potato vines contain useful amounts of nicotine that can be extracted and used in e-liquid. Atomizers can be easily made from nichrome wire. If you can’t get it direct, guitar strings can be a source of wire after burn off. Vegetable glycerin and propylene glycol are easy to get anywhere.

                • Inevitable Waffles [Ohio]@midwest.social
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  4 days ago

                  Atomizers can be easily made from nichrome wire. If you can’t get it direct, guitar strings can be a source of wire after burn off.

                  This is the kind of useful information I would expect from someone with handle like @machinist@lemmy.world.

                  But seriously, I cannot believe how much those prices are in Oz for cigarettes.

  • hark@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    5 days ago

    Looking forward to price hikes far beyond the actual cost to middlemen. The eggification of another good.

    • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      4 days ago

      Already happened to chocolate. Raw cocoa is currently around 10% more expensive than it was at the same time last year - but chocolate products at retailers has shot up 40% or more. Including brands where cocoa isn’t the dominant component ingredient like milk chocolate.

      Yet businesses like Lindt are celebrating a 7.8% increase in sales… Make it make sense to me cos I buy far less now. Who are the people who see these increasing prices and buy more 🤡

      Source data: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/cocoa

      • BreadAndThread@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        4 days ago

        Decades ago, in undergrad, I wrote a paper on recessions and the effects on everyday items. Oddly enough, the less money people have, the more likely that they will spend a tiny amount on luxury goods like chocolates. You add up all those people who buy small boxes of chocolates when they normally wouldn’t, and you’ve got your uptick in sales.

        • RedAggroBest@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          4 days ago

          Yep, becomes a lot less important to save towards something when you have less than before. Those small luxuries are a mental health savior. That plus all the feel-good chemistry that happens with things like chocolate.

          • MisterOwl@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            edit-2
            4 days ago

            There’s no sense in saving towards something when it has suddenly become more than you could ever afford. Might as well buy some chocolate, it’s good for morale.

            The GF and I were looking at houses a while back but never pulled the trigger. Fast-forward 4 or 5 years and now we will literally never be able to afford a house because the prices are fucking outrageous. We’ve given up and just spend our money on decent food instead.

            • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              4 days ago

              Housing is so loony right now. I managed to borrow enough to make a downpayment before it got really crazy. For everyone’s sake I hope the market gets flooded with affordable units and crashes the values back down to where they were in the 90s.

              I’m sorry for all the single mortgage havers whose savings is all their house, but we’re already better off than so many people just by paying the bank directly rather than a fucking land lord.

  • Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    5 days ago

    The coffee price hikes have stemmed from lower production in important coffee growing regions, particularly in top grower Brazil, reducing the availability of beans.

    That’s the closest I could find in the article as to a reason. It’d be nice to know if it was just a bad year or if this is going to be a permanent challenge going forward due to climate change or some other factors.

    • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      5 days ago

      Coffee is quite sensitive to environmental factors and only grows in certain specific regions as a result. Those factors are being upended by climate change. Coffee is going to very rapidly become a luxury product.

      Billionaires don’t care. Twenty dollars or two dollars for a cup is effectively the same price to them; insignificant. It’s the rest of us that get fucked.

      • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        edit-2
        4 days ago

        Except we are nowhere near a situation like that. Articles like this don’t tell the actual prices because they are so small people might start questioning why they pay so much for coffee.

        The poll had a median forecast for arabica prices at the end of 2025 of $2.95 per pound, a drop of 30% from Wednesday’s close and a loss of 6% from end-2024.

        $3 per pound - $6 per kilo. Or to put it in another way, 4.8 cents per shot of espresso, two of which go in a 16 oz Starbucks latte that costs you $5.75, which would be enough money to buy 120 shots worth of bulk arabica.

        If that goes up by 7% or 70% or 700%, the cost of that latte should hardly change.

        • Dhs92@programming.dev
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          edit-2
          4 days ago

          Logistics cost money

          Shucking and processing the beans costs money

          Roasting the beans costs money

          • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            4 days ago

            Exactly. And all of those stay the exact same price even if raw coffee price increases, meaning the price of a ready made cup of coffee hardly changes as the actual raw bulk coffee is only 1/60th of the total price of a starbucks latte.

            • seeigel@feddit.org
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              0
              ·
              4 days ago

              How about this explanation:

              There is a reduced supply of coffee beans. Let’s say 30%. This requires that 30% of customers have to be priced out of the market.

              If the coffee shop owners only increase the price by several cents then the demand stays the same. They have to fight for coffee beans which drives up their costs step by step.

              However, if they increase the price in advance, and far more than necessary right from the start, then the reduced demand matches the available supply and the value of the coffee beans roughly remains the same which allows them to profit from most of the price hike.

              • NSRXN@lemmy.dbzer0.com
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                0
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                4 days ago

                There is a reduced supply of coffee beans. Let’s say 30%. This requires that 30% of customers have to be priced out of the market.

                this is fiction writing. you are literally making that up

                • seeigel@feddit.org
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  0
                  ·
                  4 days ago

                  What do you mean? There are globally less coffee beans available. Or do you mean the 30%? That’s just an arbitrary number, as I tried to make clear by writing “Let’s say …”.

    • Buffalox@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      5 days ago

      From what I’ve heard this is largely due to bad weather due to climate change, as I understand it, we should not expect coffee prices to ever go back to where they were.
      For the past 4-5 years it seems prices have only gone up here. It’s more than triple now of what it used to be before Covid, and that’s only 5 years!

      But I’m not an expert, this is just what I’ve been seeing as a heavy coffee drinker in the supermarket, and what I’ve gathered from short news tid-bits.

      • neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        4 days ago

        My ground coffee has gone up about 20-30% over the past 2 years. This is just based on memory and not an exact calculation. It’s possible, I’ve misremembered the old price slightly, but either way it has gone up.

        • commander@lemmings.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          4 days ago

          The cost of pretty much everything has gone up that much in that time.

          As it turns out, more money in the hands of consumers tends to translate to higher prices.

          It’s almost like, and hear me out, it’s almost like businesses charge what people are willing to pay, not what goods cost to produce.